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Artists in Motion Bay Area & Pin@y Educational Partnerships/Patrick Cruz
In Art of Work, through a choreographic mentorship process, Patrick Cruz will explore the intersections between Hip Hop dance, Filipino identities, colonial trauma, and somatic healing work. Through conversations around labor, healing, and dance, the choreographers and dancers become historians and storytellers. The project will culminate in a film that uses dance to explore an understanding of self, family, community, and what it’s like to work in the world as a Filipino American. Art of Work is where dance is in conversation with history, healing, and identity.
Authentic Arts & Media/jose esteban abad
&theruptureisnow. is a multimedia performance choreographed by jose e. abad in collaboration with an all-queer Black cast of interdisciplinary artists: Styles Alexander, Gabriel Christian, Clarissa Dyas, and Stephanie Hewett. Honoring the Black Radical Tradition of experimentation, improvisation, and intergenerational wisdom circles, these artists will engage in the exploration of the expansiveness and future of Black life within the diaspora to create a genre-defying performance that hybridizes improvisation, contemporary dance, electronic music, altar installations, and rituals of healing through somatic work.
Dance Mission Theater/Adia Tamar Whitaker
Adia Tamar Whitaker’s project Following The Road to Ose Tura, is a dance and music response to The Road to Ose Tura, a dance film created by Ifa priestess, dancer, choreographer, and scholar, Efeya Ifadayo Olaberinjo Makala Sampson. Before Sampson transitioned into the ancestral realm, she charged Whitaker and other dance family members with setting the second part of her ancestral dance prayers and completing the dance film she began. Following The Road to Ose Tura is a four-chaptered, site-specific, ritual dance theater performance featuring Whitaker’s choreography, including film projections of Sampson’s work.
Mahea Uchiyama Center for International Dance/Meridith Kawēkiu Aki
This new dance project will introduce the tradition of hula ki'i, a type of hula where dancers use puppets to tell the story. This work will encompass the research of classical themes, the construction of the hula puppets, and development in the hula ki'i tradition. Meridith Kawēkiu Aki will work with key collaborators in Hawai'i to expand and deepen her experience in the form. She will then lead members of Hālau Ka Ua Tuahine to construct and dance with the puppets. The project will culminate in a performance featuring the lead artist, the hālau, and key collaborators.
Mud Water Theatre/My-Linh Le
My-Linh will work with the Oakland-based turf/dance theater collective known as Mud Water Theatre to produce a new evening-length performance piece that investigates dance as a method of autoethnographic research and as a pathway to healing. Autoethnography is the reflexive study of self in the context of one's own culture, using personal experience to understand cultural experience. The resulting research will be presented as a staged performance piece that critically and deeply represents the lives and experiences of the participating artists, whose ethnic backgrounds include African-American, Nicaraguan-American, and Filipino-American, and that incorporates artistic disciplines such as dance, storytelling, art technology, and digital media.
Noorani Dance/ Farah Yasmeen Shaikh
In Saabit Qadam (Perseverance), Farah Yasmeen Shaikh, with her 25 years of Kathak practice, explores the tumultuous evolution of performance and preservation of the arts in Pakistan. In collaboration with dancers, musicians, writers, and filmmakers, Farah will research and document the evolving style of dance and music that is accepted in that country. The culmination of these collaborations will be performances by Farah, the Noorani Dance Company, and other dancers and musicians of the South Asian arts, incorporating the findings from this research, to honor the persistence of artists in Pakistan, and the power and beauty of what they have created to ensure the survival of arts in their country.
The Lab SF/Indira Allegra
Indira Allegra's The Dispersal of a Feeling is Another Subject is an evening-length dance and installation-based performance which explores the choreography of indecision—the everyday movements, tics, utterances, and moments of quiet associated with not knowing what to do next. This extensive, multidisciplinary project will be composed of Allegra's original sculpture and choreography alongside videos and interviews collected by the artist, documenting indecisive moments enacted by people in public spaces. The audience will experience this immersive performance in the round as one continuous happening for 60 minutes.
Zaccho Dance Theatre/Veronica Blair
Inspired by legendary playwright/poet Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf,” COLORED GRRLS is a reimagining of an American theater classic expressed through the lens of contemporary circus. Using circus, aerial arts, dance, and original text, COLORED GRRLS peers into the lives of five women of African descent as they share intimate stories of existing in a world shaped by patriarchy, sexism, racism, and the sisterhood that grows from these shared experiences.